Thomas Frank is an writer for the New York Times. He wrote a book titled, “What’s wrong with Kansas?” where he wondered:
there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.
It is a mystery to this liberal writer why people vote to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the blue collar worker. Of course, this is not how conservatives see the world. Conservatives have sensed for a long time that liberals push are feel-good policies that have long term destructive power. As a conservative, having a “sense” for a problem is not enough. I need facts. So, do liberal policies help the working class and the minority groups they are designed to help.
Yesterday, I heard on the radio that the graduation rate in Detroit is 24.9%. That is a pretty damning statistic. Detroit and Michigan have been ruled by liberal policies for years.
Education is not the only failure. Unskilled, uneducated workers have a tough time finding work in a down economy. A recent Department of Labor reports looked at Black Employment in the Recovery and Walter Russell Mead shines the light on this fact:
The states where unemployment rates for African Americans are relatively low are states where not many African Americans live: Alaska (5.4 percent Black unemployment), Wyoming (6.2 percent), Idaho (8.0 percent), Hawaii (9.6 percent) and (at 10.3 percent) New Hampshire. Except for Hawaii all are generally conservative, low-tax states. The states with the highest unemployment rates for African Americans are staunchly blue: Wisconsin (25 percent), Michigan (23.9 percent), Minnesota (22 percent), Maine (21.4 percent) and Washington (21.4 percent)…read more
Elitists like Thomas Frank can’t understand conservatives because he thinks they are voting against their own self interest. They are not. They are just smarter than he is.
Liberals like to portray themselves as intellectuals who are able to think through the policy “nuances”. Conservatives thinking is childish, yet it is the liberals who believe that a 1% increase in taxes will yield a 1% increase in tax revenue.
Where’s the nuance? Where’s the intellectualism?
It reminds me of the early dismissive comments that liberals used to describe small-government protesters back when Obama first created the tea party with his “stimulus”. They said Obama hasn’t raised your taxes. Tea partiers saw the writing on the wall. They knew the taxes were coming, and where are we today. We have a bloated government budget and liberals want to solve the debt crisis that they help to inflate by raising taxes.
It was so transparent that I find it hard to believe liberals didn’t see the taxes coming too.
That leaves us with two possibilities. Liberals are void of the intellectualism they so cherish or blatantly dishonest….or both if you like.
When you think “conservative” and “taxes”, you automatically think tax cuts, until you consider that nearly 50% of the population pays no income tax. Conservatives see “no taxes” as destructive as 100% taxes.
Steven Hayword describes the problem this way:
one problem with our current tax policy is that at the moment the American people as a whole are receiving a dollar of government for the price of only 60 cents…Any time you can get a dollar of something at a 40 percent discount, you are going to demand more of it.
What he is pointing out is that our tax revenues are 60% of the total federal budget. We are getting government services at 40% discount. People would be screaming for fewer services if they were actually paying the real price.
His solution is not to raise taxes on business or the investing class, but on the poor. (Can’t you just hear the liberals yelling at their computer?) Get everyone invested in government waste and let’s see how middle America feels about spending cuts.
The price at the pump lags a week to 10 days behind the price of crude oil. I guess I’m not the only one who knows that. President Obama sold 30,000,000 barrels of oil from the Strategic Oil Preserve on June 22 for $10 per barrel below market costs. This had the immediate effect of dropping the price of crude keeping the price at the pump going down through the July 4th weekend.
Should we applaud Mr. Obama? I don’t think so.
The lower crude oil prices lasted exactly 4 days. From June 22nd to July 4th, the price at the pump dropped from about $3.64 per gallon to $3.54. I drove about 200 miles this week and consumed about 10 gallons. His little stunt saved me $1.00 and cost the tax payers…every tax payers…even those that didn’t travel this weekend…$300,000,000. There are approximately 150,000,000 workers. So Mr. Obama cost me $2 to save $1.
The price of crude is now about 6% higher than it was on June 23rd. By July 10th, I expect the price of gas to be back up to $3.64.
The benefit from Mr. Obama’s stunt was ill conceived, short lived and we are left with interest payments that will go on for years.
Vietnam…More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense.
The Medicare/Medicaid complex…Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government, and unless we can somehow tame these beasts America and everything it stands for could be lost.
War on Poverty…Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll.
Read the history of urbanization as the underpinning of the true problems in our inner cities and why the War on Poverty is an expensive intellectual folly.
You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know (and not even looking for) the cause of the problem.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Lyndon Johnson on July 5th, 2011
Barack Obama ran for president promising change. In truth, he is one of the biggest supporters for the status quo.
This country was transformed by Great Depression and World War II. Our country had become a highly regulated market with stable jobs. If you were a white male, you could count on a stable job for life. Companies had stable markets that were controlled by regulations. AT&T had zero competition. The airlines were stabilized by government regulations. The car companies were a huge part of the economy, unchallenged by foreign competition. The union workers that build cars could count on raises every year and a stable pension when they retired. All was good.
Or was it?
The rest of the world had been devastated by war. Europe and Asia would someday rebuild and apply pressure to our markets. Rebellious consumers would someday get fed up with the poor products and pitiful customer services provided by corporations that had nothing to fear. Women and minorities would soon find a voice and want what was once only achievable by white men.
The old model of regulation and stability was a temporary state of being only achievable when the rest of the world was reeling from war.
America changed. Markets were deregulated. This allowed new ideas to flourish. AT&T was broken up and within a few years the communications industry exploded with new products and new markets. Airlines were forced to compete and now it is cheaper to fly than it is take the train (if the government subsidies are removed). The horrible products from American car companies have been improved because of foreign competition. Women and minorities have a much better chance of living the American dream now than in any time of the past.
These are the good things, but there have been other changes that have not been some welcomed. Stability is gone. Promises of the past are no longer realistic. We can’t afford to have people retire at 62. Unions drive up the cost of labor to the point of killing the companies that provide their benefits. The only powerful unions left are those that feed from the public trough…and the public trough is no empty.
Barack Obama longs for the old days. He wants to shape our country back to a model of stability that came with regulation and unions, but he want to do this without all the negatives that came with that model.
We can’t go back. We must change our system for the world as it is today. Barack Obama is not the agent of change. If we are to succeed, the United States needs a leader that understands the world as it is…not as he hopes it to be…and can allow freedom and the American spirit lead us to our future successes.
Once again the system work, but not until after the incompetent media all but convicted what they perceived to be a white men of privileged accused by a minority women. There is no need to be fair or objective when a story fits their world view.
President Obama has decided to bomb Libya in our name. I’m no fan of Gaddafi, but then again, I’m not of fan of any Muslim strongmen in the Middle East. What strikes me about Libya is the total lack of interest. Who is giving the order? How much does it cost? What is the objective? What will be the catalyst for us to stop? Are we achieving our goals? How does is the rest of the Middle East reacting to the bombing? How will this effect the cost of oil?
These are legitimate question that would be asked of any other President.
Why does Obama get a pass on the most serious of issues?
The media is not longer a watch dog. They should no longer be the sole recipient of special protections under the first amendment. I believe bloggers do more as watch dogs then the traditional media, yet courts have denied them protections given to so-called journalists.
If the press is going to jump into bed with the government, they no longer deserve special privileged. I would say that any organization that co-opts the power over government requires more scrutiny…not less.
Posted by: The Elephant Owner in Media on July 1st, 2011
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